The Caged Mind Free
by Prudence the Rushmore Yan
Summary: Dewey man, prep school is the playground of oppression." "Yeah dude, but playgrounds have swings."
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: Don't own School of Rock, Jack Black or the loads and loads of musicians mentioned.

Rating: PG-13 (For a good load of cursing)

Summary: "Dewey man, prep school is the playground of oppression." "Yeah dude, but playgrounds have swings."

AN: I do apologize for the good load of cursing, I'm not at all accustomed to it. This was supposed to have been a prologue but half way through it morphed into a chapter. Weird. Oh, no offense to Helen Keller, Clint Eastwood or Good Charlotte fans. I have no ill will against Good Charlotte (I don't think I've ever heard them) but they are constantly being made fun of in this story, I had to chose a band to belittle it was either Good Charlotte or Dashboard Confessional. Once again, I apologize.

I

Symbiosis

"_All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,_

_I like watching the puddles gather rain," _

"No Rain" Blind Melon



Zachary Moonyham honestly had no idea how Freddy Jones managed avoid getting in to fights. He stomped around Horace Prep with his chest puffed out like Clint Eastwood on crack just looking for a fight. He would mouth off to the older kids, and shove people in line for lunch and generally piss people off, and he managed to avoid getting his face shoved in by angry la cross players and distempered fans of the bands he dissed.

"What are you talking about Moonyham, Good Charlotte sucks!"

And then, oy with the shoving and the name-calling and Zack would have flashbacks to first and second grade with the lunch stealing and the name-calling and the rock throwing. But nothing would ever happen. Sure the lacrosse dudes would move into Freddy's personal space, their sour murderous expressions betraying their nervous movement and yeah they would pace threateningly in front of each other for a bit, like pumas sizing up a sick wildebeest but other than that nothing.

It was Zack who got called names and shoved into lockers and glared at.

Which was strange because where Freddy ran around searching for a good brouhaha, Moonyham did the exact opposite it had been his first instinct since he was very small to camouflage himself, somehow become invisible because god knew everything was easier that way. Only it was kind of difficult to be invisible when you were in this band that had already developed somewhat of a strange cult following at Horace and the janitors were singing songs you wrote and girls in your Bio class were asking you to sign their t-shirts.

He'd been able to deal, because they didn't make resistance like Zack Moonyham, he'd rolled with the punches like Dewey had said, and dedicated everyday to rocking hard, fighting the man and not getting his ass kicked. Because for some reason, the la cross players, and the upper class men, and the resident Good Charlotte fan's found musical genius thoroughly offensive and sought to remind young Moonyham that while face melting guitar solos were awesome, a very much needed skill, so was the ability to run fast.

And that he did. When he wasn't camouflaged, when he wasn't neatly squeezed up against the sea foam green lockers, hiding neatly behind Freddy and Lawrence and the eighteenth round of their "Courtney killed Kurt' discussion. When he wasn't at practice, or at the record store on 35th street or holed up in his room counting his calluses. The minuet the corridor would empty and he would find himself alone a small voice in his prefrontal cortex told him something was going to happen sooner or later. It was Murphy's law, which he had a very stormy past with, jumping up to kick him in the face when it was most convenient, a part of him was sure this couldn't be helped. It was all a part of living outside the bubble.

So yeah, he was pretty much okay with it, and the small part of him that wasn't, that was tired and more than a little pissed off that the man could take so many forms thrashed and kicked and beat the hell from his flying V, and played so vigorously that Dewey had to sit down, grasping at his heart and call for a Cherry Coke break. ("Dude! You seriously went all Marylyn Manson on that solo man, nice!") It was what he had been fed for years, it was simply different people holding the spoon and trading off when they got tired. Somewhere along the thin lining of his pristine adolescence he'd resigned himself to the fact that he wasn't the kind of person to just lash out against what some would perceive as gross injustice. It just didn't happen to him. Freddy yeah, but not him.

Nearly every encounter was the same, beginning with a vague threat, usually in the form of a rhetorical question like:

"Hey you wanna die?"

Or a more direct promise such as:

"I'm gonna take you to school sucker."

To which Moonyham would reply: "Not especially." Or "It's Saturday." Both answers would lead in to the second step, usually the making of a fist followed by a pounding motion, which was supposed to have made him wet himself. Then there was shoving and the whisper of more intimate threats along with the promise of pain and repetition of the act tomorrow, then swirling violence that seemed abrupt and stark in the quiet corridor of such an established institution, a short hazy beginning of a Quentin Tarintino film he could never quite stay awake for that ended quickly with Zack sprawled out on the ground with his head feeling as though it was filled with strawberry foam. Afterward, he would lie on the cold floor, measuring his breath and wondering if one could ever shake Murphy's law.

It was pretty normal, and he wondered how on Earth Freddy could shove people around and talk about their mom's without getting punched in the jaw. Zack avoided confrontation like the plague, he hit the floor when a car backfired and whenever anyone came at him it was instant stop, drop and roll into the fetal position. So he wondered why all the la cross players and Good Charlotte fans, and seniors had made it their first extra ciricular activity to attempt to make him extinct when he never said or did anything that would even suggest any malice or dislike. But then he figured trying to apply logic to these things was like lulling an infant asleep to _"Thriller" _not so smart.

And it stayed normal, until the Friday afternoon. August was dying, the lawn of Horace High was drowning in a sea of red and yellow leaves, the sky swelled with the hallucinogenic heat of the sun and students were tearing from the grounds in a frenzy, drunk with the beauty of upstate New York and thoughts of the weekend. Zack was shoving his Lit book into his locker, some Smiths song slamming around in his head when he heard the stomping of boots and the dribbling of a basketball, the slam of a lacross stick against some lockers

"Hey it's Moonyham!"

Zack rolled his eyes.

"Oh yeah, guitar boy, haven't seen you in a while fag."

It had been about two hours. The boy sighed and closed his locker slowly; the names were really becoming irritating.

"Going home already retard, special Ed close early today?"

He held in his breath and put one hand on his locker. He knew not to turn around until the footsteps stopped, it was like a play, and he was back stage waiting for his cue.

"What's with the silent treatment you little queer, you have a bad day?"

A really great play.

"Little fag probably missed a question in Bio, haven't been kissing Severson's ass like usual huh Moonyham?" It was always the same, hey you get good grades, you're a freak. God, all he wanted was a little variety.

There were five of them at least, usually there were only two or three but everyone made a special effort to show up on Friday. Okay yeah, he had superior science skills the likes of which no one had ever seen, for this he was expecting a blue ribbon not death threats.

"Thought you'd be good at kissing ass Moonyham, you do it to every teacher in the place, every guy anyway."

He heard the sneakers pause and sucked in hesitant breath. He turned around, feeling like Mr. Pink at the beginning of _"Reservoir Dogs_". He'd been wrong, there were six, standing around lynch mob style, knocking their fists together impatiently. And he would have a been afraid, like always, the ghost of apprehension would have gripped his shoulder and shaken the sense from him, and he would have commenced with the backing away and the shaking and the protective arm motions. But not that day. He waited for it, and it didn't come, the fear and the panic and the PTSD afterward. He waited and it didn't come.

Because that day wasn't like the others.

Maybe it was the fact that it was Friday, and he'd taken a buttload of notes in European History, and gotten creamed corn all over his tie at lunch and was tired and hungry and still had to get to practice before he could collapse in his bed and sleep. Maybe it was because he'd stayed up half the night before working on a song that had come to him in the middle of the night. Maybe he realized that he was alone in this and would stay alone in it. Whatever the reason that Friday his brain malfunctioned.

"Impressive."

The word echoed in the silence of the corridor like the fire of a starter pistol. It was a moment until Zack realized the word had come from his mouth. They just stood there looking at each other, then:

"What the hell?"

It occurred to him vaguely that they probably thought he was a mute or something. He couldn't tell who had asked because he didn't see faces or distinguish voices. He didn't want to. It was better when everything was a haze.

"I didn't know idiocy of your caliber occurred naturally." He said calmly "It's impressive, it's usually the result of in breeding."

Dead silence.

"I'm just saying, I thought terminal stupidity messed with your speech or something but your motor skills are fine. Go you." Somewhere, he was only dimly aware that he was speaking, but he couldn't hear the words over the dull white roar that was rising in his ears.

"Oh, and the reason I've got a good grade in Bio is because I'm literate, it's a new thing all the cool kids are into you should check it out man."

"What the hell did you just say to me?"

There was a guttural growl, that sounded like Elmer Fudd with a hangover.

"What did you say you little queer?"

"I was just plugging reading dude, no big deal, I know that books on tape are cool and I won't ruin the ending of "_Charlotte's Web_" for you because oh man it's a downer-"

Then pain. He was shoved into the lockers, but he was grinning. Finally variety! He felt blood on his lower lip as he leaned on those lockers clutching his arm grinning like a drunken fool. He kept talking; his voice getting higher and higher, fog in his brain getting thicker and thicker, intensified by the ashes of his dumb speech.

"Plus with the books on tape you can sound stuff out which is helpful."

"If you don't shut your goddamned mouth Moonyham-"

"Congratulations, the levels of retardation you guys can transcend in minuets is astounding," When the hell did he ever sound so smug. "I'd give you a medal if I thought you could read the inscription but."

He didn't know which one hit him, but it made a sound against his head like a rain stick, and he felt his brain rattle around in his cranium.

"I guess it's the inbreeding that makes you guys so antisocial, its all good though if my parents were cousins I think I'd be a little touchy about it too." He shrugged, touching his cheek.

More pain shoved into the lockers again feeling blood foam up against his teeth like the Red Sea, talking and grinning but he couldn't stop. He felt like Helen Keller in a mineshaft.

"Come on dudes, really let's just forget the whole thing, you." He pointed to a hazy mass, the one dribbling the basketball. "Let's forget it, we can put all our differences in tiny little boxes under our beds, you wanna play horse? I can be the front end, and you, well you can just be yourself."

The fist came out of nowhere. It didn't seem to be attached to anything, it just sort of floated down slowly, like a carnivorous bird until it met his face and exploded. It reflected in his eyes before things went the blackest shade of black, tinted with hues of purple and bronze round the edges, like a sunset and an eclipse pressed together in his palms and running in messy dribbles like runny eggs down his hands. His eyes felt like electric fences that had been set on fire, vision burning as if acupuncture needles, screws of hot pain were being pushed under his eyelids. He made a sound, a dumb, girly little yelp that sounded like a three-legged dog being hit over the head with a bag of hammers and then he was on the ground and everything was damp pain soaked in ache.

Blood spilled out of his mouth, like acrylic paint being pushed out of its little tube, the dull white roar got louder and louder consuming the yelling and scrape of the shoes on tile as they kicked at his ribs. His vision swayed drunkenly in front of him, coronas trembling intensely, he lay his head down as watched the blood course down his arms.

The white hall shone with silence when they were finished. Rays of scorching sunlight ran through the windows chasing their footsteps as they hurried to get away, yelling and laughing as they went. Light bounced off the lockers and onto the floor, it filled the display case loaded with trophies and medals and mingled with the glass chandelier, spreading rainbows across the corridor. Daylight flooded the hall, filled it up to the ceiling and warmed the worn walls, coating everything in a jarring brightness that shone like cellophane.

Zack lay in a crumpled heap next to the row of lockers.

Blood and pale skin, dark hair and curled fingers. Spread on the floor like a dirty sweater, barely breathing. The white ceiling glowed at his injuries; his cheeks were purple and pink as were his hands. They searched round till they found his ribs and recoiled when their touch met with incredible pain.

His vision swam slowly, watery streams of beautiful Technicolor painted across his eyes in long strokes, green and gold and yellow and white with bits of blood in them, he twisted his head to catch the light, and his sight bled on to his collar mixed with tears and filth. His eyes shook; mouth gurgled with foam, broken brain split in two halves still humming audibly.

All the colors, they swam to him and embraced him with their soft hands, light through the window, branches of apple blossoms scratching at the glass, and at the end of the corridor, his eyes, bleeding and filthy, were caught on the sharp edges of a foamy form.. He lifted his head, blood spilled from his mouth, he strained to make the colors into shapes so he could see. White and yellow and gold swirling round in a haze, making the head and the face and the lips and the eyes and the arms. Yes a creature, dim and distant, a shadow. Near the door, a dark haired creature screaming, hair flying out in drunken waves of color that sent trembling gusts of sound to press against his bruised face. Long cool fingers enveloped his hot cheeks, he could see across the water now, color and dirt and sound and ache and pain and pulse and big brown eyes.

A grin stretched across his face painfully, wide and drunk it spread across his mouth like an arrow tearing through the plastic pain molded to his face, catching the brightness that fell through the glass and strangled the room with broken sunlight.

Summer.

The light met the color and his vision exploded. Black stars and white birds pressed themselves against his eyelids and in a breath Zack was gone.

AN: That's going to do it for the first chapter, more will come as soon as it is thought up. Thank-you


	2. Walls and Bridges

AN: Here's the second chapter. Thank you for the reviews they were greatly appreciated the comments quite flattering. Sometimes I think I may go overboard with the imagery a bit and I'm glad it didn't bother anyone. This is the first story I've ever posted and I honestly didn't think anyone would read it.

**Solitary Dragon: **Don't worry Zack is very much alive I was just trying to build a foundation for my characterization of him (which I hope is at least vaguely accurate) that left some sort of impression. The grammar mistakes are the result of the fusion of ADD and some wicked dyslexia.

**Vaguely Specific: **I think I've fixed the reviews problem but alas technology is one tricky transvestite.

**Chinsky: **Thanks for Zack's last name, I knew I was missing something, I thought there might have been an extra vowel in there somewhere.

Sorry about how long it took to update, violin lessons and Latin homework of all things…Anyway, grammar wise I'm afraid this portion is as about as worthy as the last and on that note, would anyone be willing to act as an editor for this story? If so that would be wonderful, the run-on sentences and other grammatical beasts need to be tamed! E-mail me if you're interested, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't think I like this chapter very much. I'm usually not this straightforward, not ever and this chapter seems so _obvious_. I have show-don't-tell issues and I think there's far too much dialogue. I wanted the passage of time, the concept of Zack as a character is just now unfolding in my brain, and I like that he's talking I just don't think that I should have him talking _so_ much that he reveals himself entirely. Honestly where's the fun in that? This chapter is as hazy and incoherent as the first (I'm not even sure where it takes place really) actually it's just a bunch of dialogue which is strange because I don't think I've ever written anything so short yet so clotted with dialogue.

II

Walls and Bridges

_"I can't be myself, then I don't want to talk_

_I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet whenever I want."_

Elliot Smith "_Needle in the Hay_"



"So you passed out?"

"Yeah."

"And how was that?"

"Dark."

"And you stopped breathing?"

"That's what generally happens when you pass out."

"How do you feel now?"

"Like a virgin." Zack sighed. "Touched for the very first time.'

"Uh huh. And how did this come about, if you don't mind me asking."

"Fell down the stairs." He played with the laces of his dark blue Vans. "Shoes were untied, it hurt a lot I'm going to invest in Velcro can I go?"

"Your parents know about this?"

The stark white laces fell from his pale little fingers. "Sure they do. They wanted to sue I talked them out of it, told them it might be awkward what with teacher parent conferences coming up." "I really have to go."

"You keep looking at the clock."

"Funny, it keeps telling me the time."

"You're mother told me the sarcasm was a newly acquired taste."

"I'm glad she's paying so much attention."

"Where do you have to go?"

Zack sighed, blowing breath out of his cheeks like an asthmatic puffer fish.

"Do you have an appointment Zack?"

"Band practice."

"And how are you feeling about that lately."

"Unadulterated piles of ecstatic joy, just the opposite of right now actually."

"And what do you do in the band again, you're the…drummer?"

"Guitarist."

"Oh right, I was so close. And you like playing the guitar, its fun?"

"Actually." Zack sat up. "My parents use it as a slightly delayed form or hardcore torture. You see they used to beat me with vacuum attachments and hang me by hooks from the ceiling in the basement and use me as a sort of all purpose piñata when they're dinner parties got dull but now they've found a more…interactive punishment."

"So you think you're parents are trying to punish you…by allowing you to indulge in your hobbies?"

"It was cheaper than hiring the firing range and less messy than setting me on fire." He paused. "Mother hates to get the rugs dirty. You know, they had it tough, I really think they had to choose between letting me in the band or cutting me open and donating my body to science. I think the latter won out because I get to live and really bond with my torture."

He relished the look of his captor like a smoker relishes the first drag of the first cigarette. It was like chocolate.

"And where did you get the thought that you're parents were trying to torture you. Where did that idea come from?"

"The media." He said promptly. "The ad executives at Fox told me specifically that blaming my mother and father for every small inconvenience I suffer will give me not just validation for my tiny peruile existence but loads and loads of attention both from my parents and from fine professionals like yourself. I was thinking of suing them." He said seriously nodding. "Maybe making it a class action suit, you want in?"

"Zack your father told me you had issues with honesty, with being honest and expecting honesty from others. Why do you think that is?"

"Why do I think what is?"

"Why do you think you have difficulty talking to people? Talking to them honestly?"

"They think I have problems talking because I don't talk to them, if Zack doesn't talk it means he's planning to drown kittens or forget to return library books or write letters begging to be adopted by the Manson family."

"And you don't agree with this?"

"It's a misconception, but misconceptions only have to do with perception right? And everybody perceives everything differently so I think what they think about me is wrong, and they think its right because we aren't coming from the same place about it."

"And you're doctors? Your father says you don't talk to any of your doctors honestly. Now why is that? Why do you think that is Zack?"

He lifted his head and his brown eyes stared fearlessly. "Because you're the man, and I've been trained to resist you."

"Is that so?"

"Yes."

"I wasn't aware."

"You wouldn't be would you?" "It's just a fact." Heavy sighing against the air. "You shouldn't take it so personally."

"I didn't know I was."

"It's all over your face." He said softly. "It isn't an elitist thing you shouldn't let it get to you. They were kid lessons, a long time ago."

"A long time ago?"

"Yeah." He was quiet after that.

"Zack?"

"Yes?"

"What went wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"Where did it all go wrong, when did it all change for you, for your mom for your dad, what went wrong?"

"It didn't change." His voice was even. "Nothing ever did, not really."

"Your father told me-."

"He says a lot of things." Zack interrupted. "Nothing ever changed. Not with them."

"Not with them?"

"Does the echo help you concentrate?"

"Just trying to see where you are Zack."

"I'm right here."

"I see now."

Silence.

"So you said nothing changed, not with your parents, not with your home. What about school? Did things change there?"

"Everything." His voice was so heavy.

"How?"

"Just waking up." He lay back on the white pillows of the sofa.

"Waking up? Explain that, explain waking up."

"I don't know, realizing that where you are right now, it's a box." His voice wavered like the shaky flight of a baby bird. "It's a box that you used to carry bugs around in, and you've been stuck in this box for god knows how long and it would have been fine if whoever put you in here had poked some holes in the top so you could breath. But they didn't and you just sit there in the dark waiting for your air to run out."

"I don't understand."

"Understand what?"

"You're statement, you're usually so clear about these things Zack. You feel trapped, like a bug?"

"Yes."

"And you don't have any airholes."

"Yes."

"And this is a problem."

"I can't breathe."

"I don't understand."

"It isn't astrophysics or anything, what's so hard to understand about not being able to breathe?"

"Well I wonder is this just at school?"

He shook his head. "No."

"This is at home as well?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"Its safe to say you feel like this everywhere you go?"

He nodded.

"And what is it you've learned about school?"

He sighed against the creamy white pillows. "That it's a pot that skins everything that's you off of you and puts you in this box naked so you can be clothed with all the same fear and panic and paranoia and loves and hates of every other person stuffed in that box with you." His breath came out in shallow little waves that punctured the air as he spoke to the ceiling. "And when you finally come out of that womb, all warm and bathed and clothed you aren't you, you're them or us or they. You're your friend's friend or that one guy who can do long division in his head, or the growth on a sports car or the rich kid from Manhattan who no one talks to except to point out how queer like he's looking that day,

because they think he thinks he's better than all of them"

"You're a label. You're smart or dumb or pretty or ugly, a know-it-all, a fag, a retard, a delinquent, a pothead, a jock, a genius, a shut in. You're part of the team, or the league or the squad only it isn't you it's a whole group of yous same make and models same finish same result."

His breath got thinner as he spoke. "And if you aren't part of a league or a team you're a leper and they throw rocks when you're little and when you get older they call you a queer and shove you into lockers because you're a constant reminder that things don't have to be this way. There doesn't have to be so much sameness and they can't handle it so they kick your ass and call you a fag and hope you've learned your lesson about sticking out."

"So you think its conformity, the need for everyone to be the same that's changed?"

"Its more than that."

"How? How is it more? I just summed up your entire problem in one sentence Zack."

"It's more. Resistance and stuff." He glanced up again. "You're the man right? But your only one little branch of it, see your boss he's the man, and his supervisor he's the man too, and his supervisor and his supervisor and his supervisor. It keeps going higher and higher, all the way up."

"So the man helps instigate the conformity as you see it?"

"Don't take it personally, He said voice thick with a morose webbing that clotted in his throat like blood. "It's your destiny."

"My destiny? And how would you be inclined to know about my destiny Zack?"

The boy shrugged. "I don't know."

"And you say destiny, you mean the Man has to exist?"

"Yeah." He rolled over on his side. "The Man isn't so much a person as like a force, I mean whatever's pissing you off whatever's standing in your way that's the man and eventually you're going to have to fight it."

"So the man isn't a person?"

"Chico tell him what he's won."

"I'm just trying to understand. That's all."

"The Man isn't you, not really, what you represent, what you stand for that's the man."

"I see, and one day you'll have to fight the man? Is that what you mean?"

"Figuratively speaking."

"So not literally."

"No," A quick glance over his shoulder. "I don't fare well with hand to hand combat."

"What do you imagine this fight to be like?" "Figuratively speaking."

His voice sounded so far away, a lonely little echo of broken speakers out to sea. "Like fighting something that isn't real, internal maybe."

"Internal, something from inside yourself?"

"A thousand agent Smiths."

"I imagine you're looking forward to that."

"Like I look forward to becoming a eunuch."

"So school, school's changed. What about the people, you talked at length about people last time Zack what's happened to them?"

His voice had lost all its heat, all its terrific weight. "Nothing, they haven't changed."

"Oh they haven't?"

"No."

"But at the beginning you implied that things changed you went back a bit to that first Friday and since then things have changed, people have changed haven't they?"

"Maybe a few, I wasn't paying attention."

"But you always do, don't you? You can't help it sometimes."

The thick black velvet folds of his brain were crashing into each other like awkward waves, broken walls caving into the warm hearth of his mind. His voice was long and slow, a short walk in the dark. "It isn't always what I think it is."

A pause. "You're speaking about Summer now?"

His breath beat against his lungs in quick whispers. "No."

"No?"

"I never said anything about-."

"You didn't have too, you never have to do you?"

His breath was on fire puncturing his docile lungs, beating his heart into sleepy submission.

"What's different' Zack, what's changed about Summer?"

"I don't-I never."

"Where did it go wrong?"

"Murphy's law." Zack shrugged, faint breath resting at the roof of his mouth, lying his head back staring at the ceiling.

"That's a pessimistic law don't you think?"

"Realistic."

"And that's what you need realism?"

"Yes."

"That's what Summer says."

He nodded. "I really have to go."

"You just got here."

"Forty-five minuets ago."

"You're parents paid for an entire session."

"Tell them to bill me."

Almost to the door so close, so close-

"Zack?"

"Yes?"

"I'd like to hear more about your band."

He shrugged.

"This may surprise you but I'm a large music fan myself."

He had seen the Kenny G poster in the lobby. He wasn't going to mention it because he only went after the musical taste when the novelty of the shiny new doctor wore off

. "Kenny G isn't music, He said bluntly. "It's the equivalent of being taken out back and shot, only without the most rewarding part, which is getting shot so that you won't have to hear it anymore." "That's noise pollution dude."

"I would think you're statement about perception and misconception would apply here."

"Not if the other party in question is tone deaf." He paused, feeling his breath rattle round in his ribcage. "I'm going now."

"You'll walk home?"

"Yes."

"Is that safe?"

He shrugged. "Probability I get hit by a pinto with an exploding engine versus the chances that I get picked up by a homicidal maniac who likes his steakburgers with a side of human flesh. About fifty-fifty."

"I see."

He was at the door, had his hand on the knob and everything. Turned it round and heard it snap and felt the smile wrinkle across his face.

"What about you Zack? Are you safe?"

"From what?"

"Telling me all these things, sharing what's in that head of yours with the Man."

A ghost of a grin stole across his face as the black haired boy with dark eyes leaned against the white wall with his hands on the golden knob. "I haven't told you anything." He said and he was grinning.

He ran from the white steps of the building shielding his face from the burning sun. He climbed a dry brown fence and skipped down a back street out into a field that ran the narrow lane to his house. The flowers and trees, cuffs of his black suit jacket were outlined in drowsy pale sunlight that slipped across the hills like a shawl. Grinning, he hummed a little Morrisey to himself, getting louder as he kicked the rhythm into the fence beside him with his worn old dark blue vans. He grazed the white wash fence as he ran and then the dry brown ran out and he found himself in a dull green field with sunlight plastered all over. Pale flowers coming up to meet him dolefully.

Then he was attacked, by waves of shaky laughter and a morning hale of paper bullets that shone in the sun like Inca treasure.

AN: It seems like an idiotic place to end I know but I'm honestly still trying to figure this thing out. I think I know what to say I'm just not quite sure how to say it. Anyway, don't ask me what the following exchange meant because I haven't any earthly idea. Hopefully chapter three will make a bit more sense.


	3. To Oz

**AN**: This skips around a bit. Its basically the events that transpire after Zack leaves the therapist's office put on fast forward, as if he's dreaming them. It's a kind of lucid dream since he wakes up in bed at the beginning of the chapter and returns there at the end.

About the direction of the story, I obviously didn't begin with one. I actually posted the first chapter on the spur of the moment, which is completely unlike me, because I wanted to write something that deviated from my normal genre and because I honestly didn't expect anyone to read it, much less enjoy it. I have to plan things out like, months in advance for them to make any kind of sense. (It's moderate OCD) I think I know where I'm going; though I can't promise it will be particularly engaging. It helps if I plan chapters out in my head first, if I imagine everything that transpires like scenes in a movie, characters in a certain setting reciting dialogue with a soundtrack and everything. It makes it much easier to type it out and add all the image stuff because you can actually see it in your mind.

**Solitary Dragon: **Jesus your comments are invaluable. Ray Bradbury is fantastic; _"A Perfect Murder"_ is a prime example of something succinct and moving. I had a whole Bradbury phase in seventh grade.

**MellowYellow36: **Thank-you for the memorable review! The state I live in is so red the ultraviolet glare has permanently damaged my eyes.

**Rocker Chick 777:** I read the second chapter over and the subconscious Kafka-esque of it makes sense because I remember reading "The Metamorphosis" sometime ago. Whatever I'm reading always has a tendency to leak into my writing somehow. I'd like to think Zack will fare far better than Gregor did.

**Glum n Dumb Skittery: **Creepy little Mr. Mooneyham? I like that. Yeah, I try not to be straight forward about anything especially when it comes to "human relations" Hopefully it'll go where its supposed to, either that or it'll go where it _wants_ to, I'll probably be happy with either result. (I think)

**Chinksky: **I love Zack too, (well obviously) I've always been most fascinated by him, I think he's probably one of the better choices for any kind of character study because of all the undoubtedly complex emotions that live within him.

**Dozengirl: **Ditto, with the rock on as you young kids say!

Updates oy. I've always found reading a story whose author took months to update rather irksome and low and behold I've written one. Now that I have an idea where this dark little circus is going I'm going to try and update at least once a week if not more, if I haven't sufficiently alienated the readership. Enough rambling then, onward!

III

To Oz

"_I've been out walking_

_I don't do too much talking these days." _

Nico "_These Days_"



Silence clotted in his ears like waves of blood, as his eyes became familiar with the dark tent that had spreads itself over the room. His breath came out in capsized uneven puffs and he could feel his heart glowing red under the covers, black swirled with yellow and white framed the wide windows.

His lifted head drowned in the black shadow in the doorway. His heart gnashed against his chest in bloodied volumes of pain as the darkness siezed against him in electric waves.

"Hey Zack Attack."

Blurry shapes, coming in and out of focus, colors mixing like messy paint.

"Quick question dude, how many days after the expiration date would you wager the milk's still good?"

Zack blinked ferociously.

"I mean it says August 15th and the twenty-fifth was like, yesterday but I've got a bowl of Captain Crunch in the kitchen begging for some milk man and you know the Captain, patience is not one of the virtues of a pirate." "Any thoughts?"

The rotund shadow shifted in the doorway like a schooner lost in the dark bed of the ocean, Zack could feel a storm in his head, the hangover of a sticky hot slumber that pasted his features in a thick fog that hung about his face in narrow cobwebs.

"Zack, this is important. Wake up dude."

Lines of light flying across the room and breaking against the yellow walls splintering into a billion sharp pieces that flooded the walls of his brain with violent beams of a torturous sun. White hyper light cutting everything into pieces.

"What the hell happened to your face man?"

Ground covered in soft yellow leaves. Raining from the sky in thin sheets like plummeting planes brushing the pale skin in a drowsy molestation, hot sunlight smashing into the worn marble gravestones.

Frankie's face looked like hard granite laced with freckles. His suit rumpled; hair flew in great gusts about his head like an empty nest. Eyes small and savage, primitive versed in a dead language they ripped into his skin like hot knives.

The gun barrel hovered close to his head like a housefly shaking slightly in the morning wind.

Yellow leaves in the dirty ground, glass of a broken kaleidoscope pressing against his eyes. Crows and doves wove married patterns of shaky flight above his head.

"Why weren't you at practice?" His voice was hard and thick like graphite.

"Yeah Mooneyham," A leering laugh a long way off. Freddy standing in the grass grinning like an English hog. "What the hell kept you?"

Peals of laughter that broke like paper wings, paper cranes flying on the back of his sun-stained eyelids. The grip on the gun tightened, the master finger rubbing against the brown trigger in lazy acts of foreplay.

Zack shrugged against the fence all James Dean on crack cocaine. His voice lazy and soft and rubbing against their ears like hot breath. "Nothing man, your mom just wanted me to make her breakfast."

Leaves lay on the soft soil next to him like dead fish.

"I was going to bring it to her on a little tray and everything but I had to go to the store and get bacon and waffle mix and stuff. Then I got down there and you know-."

"What the fuck did you say?"

The leaves were blowing in his face, deformed yellow hands clawing at his speech The yellow blurred together, runny sunshine coated with brown dirt under his shoes, sunlight everyone had wiped their boots on. Ripped and ugly like dead butterflies swimming in sour milk.

"Well you know, I forgot my coupon for O.J. so I had to go back and your mom had to get dressed and look for her purse and everything, then she offered to drive me back to the store, she was a real sport about though. We saved you some waffles dude, they should be on the counter or something."

Freddy's face looked like hot molten lava. Red angry ash sweeping down in violent, foaming shards, warm skin boiling, an overcooked sun god. The cooked leaves rode upon the air like dancing drunks, swaying and beaming and falling to their deaths on the sharp corner of his shoulder.

Zack tried not to smile.

"It's no big deal man, we were talking about it last night and tomorrow morning she gets to make me breakfast its only fair."

Light filled every free space setting the falling leaves on fire and burning his mute eyes. Zack heard the sound of the trigger being taunted back to its start before the gun went level. The sound was swallowed by the roar of traffic and then it was all rush, broken pieces of burnt film over his eyes sun all over and blood on his mittens that lay like two praying hands in the coffin of dead leaves next to his head.

His brain, burnt and hollow, rubbing against his cranium like a cat as he lay breathing heavily in the leaves. He closed his eyes and the blackness was like thick velvet, night with bits of color stuck in it, faint voices melded in a liquid stream of sound poured into his ears like thick paint. The gun's worried whine slithered into the crescent tunnels of his hearing, the frantic flutter of a moth caught in his hand, trapped in the dark blind and battered. The golden summit of sound that caressed the morning with gnarled fingers was broken into shards that lay round his head like a crown.

"What the hell dude!"

His fingers were rubbing the cold tile, wiping all the blood neatly into the gray cracks that ran through the bathroom like lines of an earthquake. Light forcing its way under his eyelids, walls and bridges made of darkness and light absolving into thick tar that bled into his eyes like acid rain.

His hands were white birds in shaky flight; pale slender fingers coming together like wet dented wings. Struggling against the gaping mouth of the clean white toilet, flimsy pieces of smooth rock pressing desperately into the burning white. The arch thick turpentine like a hand strangling his breath, touching his eyes with dark pressure that sent his vision into waves of seizure.

"Oh fuck man do you need a bucket?"

Lines and colors leaned and swayed and pressed themselves against his eyes aggressively. Consuming his head in a roaring fire, high fever doused in a cool lucid dream he was trying to claw out of his stomach, his fingers scratched at the clean white toilet like cats as he lay against the mouth choking.

"Damn it kid my boss is gonna kill me!"

The walls were gray, white pieces of granite how the pale light bathed them. Color of dead swans face up in the dirty water. Shadows leaning and embracing on the walls like a dark movie, hooded heads blotting out his eyes in a veil of thick sleep.

"Oh my god kid wake up."

Walls and bridges.

"Damn it man come on!"

Soft upon the distance of his mind ran peace as he drowned in the dark velvet. Gossamer skeletons danced behind the pink foam of his eyelids like balloon animals filled with purple pus as he stretched out his fingers to meet the broken light, the dark curve that rested in the narrow womb of his interrupted thought

"Alright, okay dude I'm calling the cops or…something. Goddamn it he's gonna kill me!"

Outlines lay at the corner of his brain, chalk lines of flat rosebushes and dried weeds dying of thirst in the parched deserts of his thought. White and screaming, a dead language scrapped off the soul of speech flying in horizontal lines at his burning continuance, thoughts on fire chasing each other in concentric circles as the words eroded his crumbling skull.

Darkness felt like heavy velvet on his face.

The veil came over his eyes and the room lay broken and crooked blurry filthy tears lamented his eyes in glossy film that felt like fire. A dead weight stirred within him, a black crow trapped in his chest large dark wings beating against his ribcage, swift edges of sharp feathers piercing his throat leaving trails of blood running like streams. It was growing, pushing against his chest clawing at his stomach but it wouldn't come out so he put his face to the white porcelain mouth, fingers struggling against the blinding circle trying to throw up all the blackness that lived in his stomach and clotted the corridors in his head like smoke. He knelt like a cowering slave forcing out the thick solid darkness, shoulders drenched in perspiration that ran down his face in thick clouds. Ghosts of his fever hovering above his head like black roses, filling his ears with whispers of sweat and fear, Pale light, cold floor, screams devoured by the soft humming of Yusef Islam overhead.

Standing in the broken mirror touching the purple plains of his bruised face softly. There were lines on his hands, tracks of dirt round cuts and dried blood. Like a violent map, an old face beaten in among the blue and purple veins of his arms that swayed like jungle trees. His eyes felt entombed in hot glass, tinted in light purple and violent orange they framed the universe of his battered vision circles and squares packed with pale light, blurry oblong forms that swam and drowned in the flood in his eyes.

Dirty mouth and liquid eyes. Cut into jagged pieces of broken glass.

A hot high fever dream lay in his brain, coming to a boil in a sea of vomit, an explosion of white roses and dove feathers. Glittering roomy corridors of his brain were filled with the shrill echoes of the dying white roses as they climbed the soft terra firma becoming lost in all the pink wrinkles and screaming to the dark heavens of his cranium.

Shaky light and soft music, Joey Ramone glared at him from the white ceiling.

White outlines swayed beyond the blackness filling his eyes with hot steam. He ran his dented white wings along the jagged cliffs of the glass, felt the linear curves and edges like crystal on his soft skin. Fingers danced on the tips of the glass that shot out like mountaintops, pranced on curved valleys of dull pain.

The puncture didn't make a sound, thin stream of vivid red running down his palm like water, pale and earnest in the light like a friend he'd lost. He hadn't done it on purpose, hadn't meant for his finger to sweep down the mouth of the glass so slowly, hadn't meant for the red wrinkled skin to slip along the foothills at the bottom of the cliff where the glass came up like thorns against his wings.

He hadn't meant for it, but now that it was there, warm liquid in his palm bright and deep he didn't mind it so much. It wasn't so bad. He sank to the floor to inspect it, warm hazy circles dappled with pastels crowns and birds shooting up from the floor and pasting themselves against the black back drop of his brain. The river in his hand was flowing and Yusef Islam was singing _if you want to be free be free_, and Joey was glaring at him from above like the patron saint of blood loss and ghosts of colors were doing the Charleston with each other on the walls, speckling the room with sickly spots of dirty gray light that shone like silver.

He smiled round at them all, and the river kept running and his ghosts kept humming and he could hardly hear the scream of the white roses. The crow lay dead in his chest, like a black heavy cloud squeezing his lungs in its talons. Feathers layered in masses of funeral black packed against his breath. He smiled until his face hurt, until his grin caused arrows of pain to shoot across his face and he felt the wings flutter in his chest.

The room began to break. Like the skin in his palm, a coarse line caked with dirt and blood, light opening the wound and making the walls cave in like the folding of a monarch's wings. The constriction of his heart and the height of his voice lay in ruins of hot breath on his bloodied hand when his vision was flooded with the thick white light that soiled his blood and broke the room in two.



"I don't know what happened man, he just passed out."

The words washed over him in sweaty heaps, like short stab wounds in his chest. Pressure played a lengthy drum solo on his spine.

"He came in and I thought he was looking for a record you know. Kid comes in here nearly everday. His face was pretty banged up and he was walking funny but he nodded at me and stuff so I just thought he was you know…a little retarded or something."

"Which is totally cool or whatever if he is, but I gotta make a certain number of sales a month and stuff or my boss'll have an aneurysm or something he's a total hard ass man hardcore Nazi. Your kid looked like a Death Cab fan so I tried to shuffle him toward the indie section or whatever. I tap him on the shoulder and he turns around and vomits all over me!"

Larry had been cheating on his twelve step program and was taking a long drag of the first cigarette he'd had in six weeks when a giant balloon of a guy who looked like Chris Farely on some serious acid put his face against the window Larry was leaning on. Fearing he was witnessing the wide, meaty face of Satan himself Larry had backed away from the window in shock and dropped his cigarette nearly lighting his pants on fire.

"I'm on my break right, so I have Herbie take him to the bathroom and Herbie comes runnin' out with a mop telling me the kid missed the toilet. I just scrubbed that bathroom this morning dude, my pits smell like Windex. So I go back there, and he's hurling chunks like you've never seen and I tell him I'm gonna call somebody. I just called 911 cause he couldn't open his mouth without something gross spewing out of it and while I'm out here using the phone Herbie tells me that he's passed out on the floor and he won't wake up. We found your number in his pocket."

He'd come barging through the double doors with the anguished roar of a sexually frustrated Creed fan. Hair raging about his head in messy circles the color of burnt sunrise; he'd danced in front of the curtain of smoke that hung from Larry's pale countenance like excess flesh. He had reminded Larry of the love child of a crippled racehorse and the Hulk.

"My boss is gonna kill me, I wasn't even supposed to come in today, goddamned Vinnie had to go to his grandmother's funeral in Queens this weekend. Fifth time she's died this month, so I had to get up at five o clock in the morning to open this musical hellhole. This kid? First customer of the day and I have to run clean up."

Larry paused to look back at the hefty guy who had stopped in the tribute band aisle clutching his chest like a lost Alzheimer's patient, his hair flying round like a Roman crown, battered and beaten by the air conditioner.

"He yours?"

"He's staying with me while his parents are out of town. I'm his music teacher."

"Oh yeah?"

"How is he?"

Larry didn't answer, just kept walking and talking in that nervous rambling voice he had acquired on the smoky streets of Jersey to keep from getting his ass kicked too much. The shrugging, Woody Allen whine that could talk eighty year old women into buying Sex Pistols albums.

It wasn't until they were at the end of the aisle and David Bowie was giving him that come hither stare across the blue lights of Candlestick Park that Larry realized just who he was rambling to.

"Wait."

Wild hair shifted under the dim yellow lights as his eyes touched the stage play of confusion being drawn across the wide junctions of the rotund fellow's face.

"You're Dewey Finn. Oh my god you're Dewey Fi-. From Maggot Death man!"

The misted eyes winded with recognition.

"Dude this is incredible! I love you guys, you were like my favorite band back in the day. Oh man, _Valley of Rotting Corpses IV_ is my favorite LP."

Wide white hands, like flesh colored headless rabbits, curled into fists.

"I loved that one song…oh god, I think it was from _Tell Chico the Morgue's on Fire_. How did it go?"

Because of the massive ADD he'd suffered his entire adolescent life, Larry failed to notice the deeply fatigued and mildly murderous expression that littered the portly man's haggard expression like a solid sheet of hail. He then proceeded to snap his fingers and hum a little hoping this would jump-start the iPod in his brain and retrieve the lost tune.

"It was like…da..da..da…burning corpses everywhere, burning fingers burning hair gotta something something something dude it was awesome, you guys were hardcore!"

"Dude."

"So many bands, their albums are great but they totally suck in concert. But you guys

I went to go see you at the Cavern your like second show or something and you guys blew the roof off that place it was crazy dude!"

"Dude."

"Oh man, I got so hammered when you guys played the Rio in Albany, that's how I met my girlfriend Sheila, do you remember her? Short chick with curly hair and huge ankles? You signed her stomach in sharpie."

"Look-"

"I didn't recognize you without foundation. What are you doing now man?"

"Hey Kibbles and Bits!"

Larry completely unprepared for such yelling paused.

"What's your name?"

"Larry." Larry pointed with great authority to the large yellow nametag pinned to his Shins T-shirt.

"Great Larry, tell me where the bathroom is."

"In the back." Then he had to run to keep up with the long gazelle like stride his large hero had adopted. "I remember when you guys were selling CDs outside of Seven Eleven and putting on shows in the parking lot, then you MC'd on Marvin Fluty's underground garage when Marvin was still on FM and he got food poisoning from some bad giflte fish."

Past ACDC, The Rascals, and the inquisitive looks of Sonny and Cher.

"Sheila said she got propositioned by your lead guitarist when you guys played the Rio. Something Schneebly? Do you remember if you saw anything? I don't know, the doctors say she's some kind of pathological liar or something so-"

Through the maze of posters and T-shirts and the brightly colored comic books that lay in short stacks like prisoners of war. Past disgruntled Metellica fans with overbites and wicked acne, semi-intoxicated soccer moms singing along to Celine Dion over black headphones and a brooding, homicidal looking bunch huddled in a corner listening to Moby and weeping noisily, round the gumball machines and the sale rack and the large rather intimidating cardboard cut out of Mr. T.

The nasal voice of the sales kid from Flushing behind him fell from Dewey's ears like a thin layer of melting frost.

Elliot Smith was sending thick whispers against his ears as he stepped into the cold chamber of the bathroom, but all he could here was the whirring of the broken pipes that played lonely ballads in the pale walls.

Blood and vomit stained his eyes. A sea of holes and blackness, shaky light and broken glass filth and pools of blood, it was like the worst low budget horror movie ever. The Blair Dewey project.

Sirens in his head. Scalding red and brusque blue sending blemishes across his vision, stark and white a scene from _The Wall_ put on pause.

Zack was under the sink, on his side like a cygnet thrown out of the nest by the mother swan.

All the air flew from his lungs. It migrated to the far corner of the dark chamber until it smashed against the wall. He walked over slowly, like Mr. Rogers with a hangover, and the room went sideways. Slanted like those damned ugly cubism portraits. His fat white fists went out before him but all they touched was air charged with static electricity that stung his fingers.

_Mama this surely is a dream_ Dewey knelt on the floor like a drunken groupie, mind scrambling like the burnt omelet Ned had made him that morning. Sticky pancake batter plastered in between the pink lobes of his brain, his musical cortex burning and humming and fizzing as he touched the boy's small shoulders and turned him over willing in the name of rock for it not to be so. Calling his name over and over. The slowest mantra in the world.

"Ambulance is here dude."

The shoulders tensed and there were Zack's eyes reflected in the shard of glass shaped like California near Dewey's black Converses. Pale light splashed over his face like water as his features arched themselves into painful folds and creases and goddamn it Dewey Finn finally knew what it felt like to be a parent. Constriction and the twitching and the sweating and the ticks and latest shock of hair to fall out on account of stress as you haul ass to your van and speed through about a thousand red lights. Getting stuck on the bridge because of a goddamn traffic jam and not having intense mood music like Bruce Willis got in _Die Hard_ because the goddamn result of too much alcohol and absence of birth control in the tiny little Hyundai in front of you choose _today_ to discover his obsession with Roberta Flack so you had to fume and worry and beat your head against the steering wheel and eventually escape and fly down the highway, the sound track to your paralyzing worry? "_Killing Me Softly_" Goddamn it.

"Zack Attack, Zack wake up."

Rapid blinking underneath the curtain of black lashes, eyebrows knitted together like two birds in flight.

"Dewey?'

'Um yeah dude, unless you feel more comfortable calling me Ned."

Trails of slumber under his chin, traveling down the thick canyons of the pillows. "What is that?"

"What's what?"

"That…music."

A smile in the dark. A long white Cheshire grin that lit fires among his visual neurons.

"You must be out of it man, that's Styx. Apparently Mr. Soft jazz corporate zombie fetus face down the hall likes his Styx at six o clock in the morning."

"Tell him to turn it off, it's giving me cancer."

"I'd do that but we've had brouhaha's before and I can't fight him if he's on his own turf, I mean Kenny G is-"

"You're kryptonite I know."

"Try to sound a little more serious when you say it. It's a bitch brother, I should be able to park in the handicapped spaces." "If you played the clarinet long enough I'd probably die."

"Kenny G plays the flute."

"Its sad that you know that."

"It's sad that you can't go down the hall and tell someone to turn down their loud crimes against the human hearing."

"And come back smelling like the Man, I'd rather dip my brain in battery acid."

"It would take less time to talk to him."

"Yeah but I'd like the battery acid more. And Styx doesn't suck, they can but they usually don't."

"They're your ears."

Hot air propelled itself through the air above their heads. Dark New York night spilling hungrily through the open window. Beech trees formless in the dark, branches hanging in the window like drunks, orange streetlights making shadowed prints of the beech leaves on Zack's pillow.

"So?"

"So."

"You think the milk's still good?"

Heat covered the room like a veil.

"Go for it man."

"Alright, dude we're having the Styx discussion tomorrow they can not suck its possible."

"That's what you said about Oasis."

"What's wrong with-I'm not even talking to you about Oasis I'm not even going to go there. If you'd like to contribute anything other than insults, like say some constructive criticism yo, feel free."

"Listening to them lowers your I.Q. by at least four points per song."

"Yeah, that's not constructive criticism."

"Its supposed to help them improve right?"

"Improve not give up their careers or cause them to commit suicide."

"I think either of those would improve their music."

"These are the moments that give me nightmares about you working for _Spin_, plus if Oasis got in a fiery car crash and burned to death tomorrow I bet you'd feel pretty bad."

"I'd live."

"Unlike Liam and Tony."

"That's the idea."

"Fine you go to sleep, you think about becoming a failed musician and having to work for the Man in the mail room at Rolling Stone cleaning up after that Brittany Aguilera chick's dog then you come to me in the morning and tell me if you'd rather have Oasis die in a fiery car crash than do that for the rest of your miserable life."

"Okay man, but I'm pretty sure I'm all for Oasis dying."

"In the morning dude."

Light was already crawling into the room through the open window, thin shades sliding across the hardwood and making pale shallow shapes on the floor. The swollen pit of dark oyster colored clouds lay on their own nest to the East winking at Zack and tracing the outline of his bruised face.

"You okay?"

"What?"

"I was going to the bathroom I heard noises in here. You look a little wigged out dude."

"Its dark."

"I can tell when someone's wigging out I lived with Ned for like, ten years. You alright?"

"Yeah, I'm just…I'm fine."

"You didn't have the MC Hammer dream again did you?"

Zack allowed himself to cringe, and shook his head.

"Good cause that thing freaked me out. Everything's cool?"

"Yeah, I was just…remembering."

"Way to be cryptic dude, try to get some more sleep man Shawshank starts in like two hours."

"I could sleep if Styx guy could turn down a couple of notches or if you stole his CD player."

"The mofo won't budge, I think he's a little obsessed. And the last time I tried to steal something I ended up in a prison in Tijuana playing in some cheap make shift Maruichi band so that I wouldn't be violated so I'm really not down with the jail time meho. You on the other hand could get off easier because you're younger and we could get some doctor to say your hatred for Oasis drove you steal. Plus your always reading and dude reading is for passing the time on long prison terms. You want to go crash neighbor dude's jam session you go ahead but if your come back and your face is shaped like a fetus and you want to put on some Kenny Loggins, it'll just make prison all the harder for you man."

Dewey nodded thoroughly, and under the thick howls of _"Nothing More, Nothing Less"_ issuing from the wall, he could make out the quiver of Zack's snores that sounded like a small train coasting through a tunnel in a snowstorm. He shielded his eyes from the wisps of sunlight that blew through the room like strands of dust and closed the door gently behind him mind full with how surreal it felt to have a kid in his place, to actually have to use regurgitated authoritarian language like "Go to bed" dude the paternal instincts were kicking in everywhere.

It was like the bizzaro world.

His mind was clouded with it, and he tried to pacify such thoughts with a good bowl of the Captain's finest, running to the bathroom shortly upon finishing said bowl determining as he went that Zack definitely did not have that whole clairvoyant touch when it came to dairy.

AN: That's chapter three absurdly long without really getting anywhere I wanted to establish Dewey's character right away, hopefully it isn't way _way _to off base. I hope the brief outlook of "Larry" from the record store and his Maggot Death obsession didn't detract from the plot too much; I needed a short break from writing for Zack because it can get so intense sometimes. I'm not even sure where on Earth Larry came from and Dewey seemed like an ethereal presence (even when he was speaking) because I really didn't want to focus on himbring him alive until he saw Zack. The fight with Freddy and the bathroom incident all occurred on the same day Zack saw his therapist and he was just remembering those things in his dreams, hence the opening and the closing. If that threw you off I apologize and if you kind of got it on your own then I'll stop pontificating.

Yeah…uh…ah no offense to Oasis or fans of Oasis. I quite enjoyed "Wonderwall" and "Leighla" shows promise and I don't want any of there band members to die in a fiery car crash (or any other crash…or just to die period which wouldn't be a problem if they were immortal or something, but I digress) Not such a fan of Styx but still don't want any member of the band to die in a fiery car crash. I think I already apologized to fans of Kenny G but if I forgot I'm sorry. Kenny Logins and Moby too, and whomever I offend from this point on. I had a dream about MC Hammer once; it was scary beyond all reason.

"


	4. Growing Pains

AN: I'm not satisfied with this chapter at all, I'm not quite sure why. Oh well.

**Solitary Dragon: **I wasn't being sarcastic at all (I know it's a bit difficult to tell in print since my story is so snarky) You were my first reviewer, therefore I'm sort of spoiled. I love the length and detail you go into describing what you liked and what you didn't, they're quite helpful (and the job they do on my ego Jesus!) I'm really happy you liked the dialogue, I'm always afraid I'm way too out of character, I try to imagine the characters saying these lines but I'm always worried about it. I went through a Poe stage too, about fourteen I think right in between Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. I loved _"Catcher in the Rye"_ and you should definitely read _"Metamorphosis"_ its beautiful and quite depressing.

I'm not sure exactly, it does seem as if Zack's a masochist doesn't it? I don't think he can handle any of the stuff that's thrown at him so he's sarcastic and I think he's gotten used to the product of his sarcasm (usually violence) and a small part of him wants that to continue so at least something in his life will be consistent. If that makes any sense.

**Rockerchik777: **Thank-you, I always have an awful time trying to balance imagery with dialogue and the content of the character's heads.

**Vaguely Specific:** I'm glad you liked it! I'm sorry if the fight was confusing. Ah…I probably should have explained this earlier; there exists currently a very thick strand of animosity between Freddy and Zack for events that will be explained in later chapters. They've drifted from the "friendship" they both used to enjoy and I've always thought of Freddy as the possessor of a splendid temper and even if they had been close friends and Zack had said those things to him…I would most likely expect the same results. I have issues with being clear and coherent when I'm writing something like that, it's a bit like trying to see through fog, sorry about that.

**MellowYellow36: **_"Wonderwall_" is awesome, I like Oasis…I just like making fun of them a little bit more.

**Syaint Jimmy: **I'm sorry you were confused, chapter three skipped round a bit.

**No Such things as Happy songs: **Thanks for the review!

**United Nude Postmasters IDH: **Yeah…I can go a little overboard with the imagery sometimes, once I get starred it's a bit difficult to stop. I'm glad you liked the story though! Thanks for the Kenny G fact as well, I could have sworn it was the flute.

This chapter actually exists as a continuation from the last one (It's a miracle) but first, another visit to the therapist office. I've noticed my chapters (this one included) don't quite go anywhere, it's difficult but chapter five should have some mobility in it, at least change locations once or twice. Jesus.

IV

Growing Pains

"_The sun came up with no conclusions,_

_Flowers sleeping in their beds, _

_The cities cemeteries humming _

_I'm wide awake its morning." _

Bright Eyes _"Road to Joy"_



" Tell me about Dewey."

"What do you mean?"

"Dewey. I want to know about him."

"Is this like that time you wanted me to explain who James Taylor was and you thought I was talking about one of those guys from Hanson?"

"You talk about him often, he seems to be important to you."

"Oddly enough, he's a guy…and his name is Dewey, I think that's the gist man."

"He's your music teacher."

"Did you get that one all by yourself?"

"Your parents told me all about him, sounds like a character."

"Didn't know you were interested."

"I am because you are."

"Because I am?"

"That's right."

"So if I wanted to sell pot to third graders and hunt water buffalo…"

"We could see about getting you an off campus pass."

"Hm."

"You seem relaxed."

"Mother and I shared an Oxycontin cocktail on the way over."

"I thought you're parents were out of town?"

"And I thought being a doctor implied the possession of at least one iota of intelligence."

"I just mean you seem lighter, less guarded, there's a youth about your face Zack, it wasn't there a week ago. Have the days been good?"

"Better than bad ones."

"I would think, and Dewey…Staying with Mr. Finn, that's part of it, you're enjoyment of that?"

"I guess. Though the manual labor and the porn marathons do wear on one's nerves after a while. Price you pay I guess."



The fork-tongue of Gene Simmons knocked him off the thick tidal wave of his salty sun stained dream and cut into his sleep like a hungry python. _"Rock and Roll all Night"_ blared dully in his head as the edges of the room swam in foamy forms against his eyes.

The gigantic poster of Jim Morrison on the ceiling seemed to be peering into his soul, and judging by his harsh glare he wasn't too satisfied with the contents. Zack lay on his back listening to the heavy snores that sounded like cats being sat on sailing through the dull yellow walls.

The sounds of the morning beat his ears into a silent submission as he closed his eyes buried his face into the worn Flintstones pillow, and wrapped his arms around a flighty elusive slumber.



"And I'm sure you enjoy that your parents trust you? Enough to go out of the country without you, after what happened?"

"Its flattering, the chip in my brain not only files and faxes a detailed report every time I piss, it also alerts them whenever I have a distinctively impure thought about my elderly neighbors or when I eat foods high in sugar."

"You think they don't trust you?"

"I don't think they want to. He smiled widely. "Dad wanted the economy-sized chip that measured my brain waves and had an automatic police dialer just in case I ever killed anyone, its sweet."

"I would think you're parents were perfectly justified in being apprehensive about leaving you alone, after what happened wouldn't you? I would think they were being quite lenient, quite trusting. How long are they gone?"

"Till one of them remembers they have a son at home I expect."



Said sleep was broken into a hundred tiny shards by the sharp rapping on the door, then a creak that sounded like the death of patience, the clear voice of his class president like brisk winter against his ears, prattling on interrupted by a short scream. He landed on the hardwood floor of the rumpus room nose first, blunt pain knocking the sleep from him in swift blows. Then Dewey's voice racked with lost sleep and too much saki.

"Sorry about that, Tinkerbell let me just grab a shirt."



"Your father told me you started cursing."

"Did he buy you a chip too?"

" He came to see me before he left, wanted to make sure you attended sessions while they were gone."

"The Bubonic plague couldn't keep me away."

"He said the cursing came from Dewey. Same with the loud music at three am, and the sarcasm and the insubordination."

"And the energy crises and the Aids epidemic and Castro still being in power its all Dewey, he's infecting our air and impregnating our women."

"You think your father's worries are unfounded?"

"My dad wakes up and realizes its been fourteen years and he doesn't know me and I can run an internet search and know more about him than I do right now, I get it completely Dewey's fault."

"But your father still resents him?"

"He isn't really selective about the loathing."

"I understand they got off on the wrong foot, first impressions can prove to be quite lasting."

"He thought Dewey was a pethaphile big deal, I'm sure it happens to you all the time."



He was buzzing all over, stale stocks of static electricity burrowing into his blood stream and setting his capillaries on fire. Bits of sleep stuck to the edges of his eyes like webbing, the bright room framed with pieces of phantasmal foam smashed against his retinas splitting the room into bright shards.

He lay in the pale yellow morning with his ears pressed against the soft pillow his eyes closed, slipping into the canyons and valleys of that voice as it unfurled itself in his ears like clear winter wind.

Stuck between the soft sun and the dark starlit realms of sleep it rode into his head like soft thunder ripe with rain. Grin large and painful as he felt the erosion of the warm soil in the forests of his mind, uprooting trees and tracking all over the soft terra firma making fingerprints on the red dust on the walls of his brain. Winter sunlight in his head. Sending tufts of melting hail to rest against the cemetery of his unprocessed thought

It had been so long since he'd heard her voice.



"And it's better staying with Dewey, there are more good days?"

"I don't know, I haven't been counting."



He followed the lazy curve of his long shadow that spread itself on the narrow walls like slow black fire until the corridor opened and he was struck with the sun coming through high windows. KISS pouring from somewhere in the corner of his head blasted the wide room into pieces and shook the dim light over his head.

Bare feet on the cold floor in between long shafts of light that made the air glitter, dense jungles of green plants stretching their arms across worn furniture touching the greasy lids of empty pizza boxes. Broken black Saki cups lay dismembered across the coffee table, guitar picks resting in pairs of unlaced Converse sneakers straps and cables lay in thick trains across the floor. Plants hanging from the ceiling, decrepit old rockers glaring at him in large black and white photographs from above the fireplace, air and space, the sunlight chiseling at the narrow canyons of their cheeks.

Zack breathed in until he was dizzy.



"Ah, and in your mind would you say that you respect this man? That you hold him in a different light than you would most people?"

"I guess."

"I suppose what I'm trying to ask is, do you see Dewey as part of the whole, as this large force you're constantly having to fight against? Or do you see him more as one would a father? Is he like a paternal figure to you?"

Zack sat up on the white sofa, hair falling into his eyes like dark snow and gave his captor a steady look so grim and satisfied in its confidence it caused the air to shake with an electric calm.

"He's better."



"Top of the morning homie."

Dewey stood in the kitchen holding out his coffee mug in a jovial toast, blue robe flowing behind him lapping softly against his large calves, hair stretching itself dangerously close to the swift turning blades of the ceiling fan. He looked like a giddy mildly disoriented Mary Poppins. As if inhaling a few tanks of methane gas helped the medicine go down.

"Dude." Zack said slowly. "Close your robe."

"Oh sorry man, I was trying to give that foxy chica across the street a little peep show." He pulled the waistband of his _Pink Floyd_ boxers above the equator of his porcine belly and tied his robe round him.

His laughter came in great fiery bursts cultivated by Zack's expression.

"Were you trying to proposition her or blind her?"

"Proposition her dude, what do I need with a blind girl?" Then his wide squire contance spread itself into a revolutionary grin. "Hold that thought man."

"I wish I had a time machine so that every time you said stuff like that I could hop in it and prevent your birth."

"Dude I'm actually old enough to have prevented your birth, I wouldn't have minded splitting up your units because lets face it your mom's pretty hot."

"Dude!"

"You asked for it Mr. Morning Diplomacy, but you're lucky man I'm not a homewrecker."

Zack put his head in his hands trying to pummel the disturbing images and make them come out of his ears. "Dude!"

"I'm sorry man, the truth must be known, now eat some breakfast and I'll try my best to forget about how hot your mom is. Hey, if you're gonna blow chunks get on it doggone it. We gotta jet soon."

"Yeah, Zack muttered quickly. "I wasn't actually planning on going today."

Dewey looked confused. "Ah damn it did I miss another holiday?"

"No dude," He put his hands on the cool counter and took a quick breath. "I was just planning to take a day of mourning that's all."

"For?"

"Break of Blink 182." Zack nodded vigorously.

"Come again?"

"It happened about a week ago dude, I thought you knew. It was just so unexpected man I-I think I'm just gonna take some time." He put his hand to his heart and leaned on the counter for support.

Dewey stared at him. "You think you're funny?"

"What? The boy asked incredulously. "It cut me deep!"

"That's disgusting, try again."

"What happened to musical tolerance Ghandi?"

"That's when we were talking about Oasis. His beady eyes narrowed with suspicion. "Have you been watching VH-1?"

"Dewey I-" 

"Don't lie to me dude, I can smell it on your breath."

"You don't even have cable!"

"So? How do I know you aren't sneaking off to _Best Buy_ and watching it on the big screens? Like some junkie."

"I didn't-"

"Dude music television kills your brain." His crazy eyebrows shook and danced along the plains of his forehead eyes riddled with a drunken mania. We've been through this dude,

I don't think you're ready for the downward spiral watching MTV and VHI and DIY is gonna throw you down, first you're watching I heart the forties, next you're buying cardigans and sweaters originally made for girls the next thing you know you've got a goatee and your in a Journey tribute band. Is that what you want?"

"I-"

"Is it?"

"No."

Dewey threw his hands up in the hair, gesticulating wildly. "Then what the hell dude?"

"I don't feel like it. Going I mean." Zack groaned and hoisted himself onto the counter sitting morosely next to the gleaming white toaster. "Screw school."

"That's the spirit brother."

"School is the breeding ground for the man."

"Yes."

"Prep school is the playground of oppression."

"Yeah dude but playgrounds have swings."

. He leaned on the counter and fixed the wide fellow with a calm look. "Do I have to?"

"Yeah man, its important you know…reading and stuff."

"I know how to read Dewey."

The rotund man's face fell. "Well's there's other stuff like you know, addition."

"Got it."

"Subtraction."

"Yeah."

"Uh, those little things where there's like a number on the top and another one on the bottom-"

"Fractions?"

"If that's what they're calling 'em now."

"Fourth grade."

"Damn."

"Come on man its just a bunch a burn outs with teaching degrees trying to live vicariously through us or something it's total bull."

"Dude, dude." Dewey sighed coming to stand in front of him under the broken lamp that swung above their heads like a dead crane "No one can make you feel better about going to a school full of la cross playing, glue sniffing zombies. But this is me Sensei Dewey telling you, trust me, it could be worse man."

"How?" Zack groaned.

He ran a large hand through his messy beard that looked like a sloth had died on his face it shone in the pale sunlight that came from the narrow window behind a haggard looking photograph of Hendrix smoking a joint.

"We could be in prehistoric times and then you'd have to worry about getting' to Chem on time _and_ outrunning the T-Rex. Don't look at me like that dude, it could happen."

Zack glanced at him. "Again, what's the point?"

"I just told you, Dewey sang. to live and to learn and the world will be a better place for you. He paused. And for me."

"But you have to agree that sometimes you've got to fight for your right to party."

Dewey nodded. "Yeah, but not when its gonna hurt someone else dude. After all, what the world needs now is love sweet love. You might say it's the only thing that there's just too little of."

"Dude we don't need no education."

"I hear you man, Dewey patted his shoulder. "But something tells me we'll all float on okay."

Zack stared at him.

"You're welcome." Dewey nodded slowly, fixing him with an appraising look.

"For what?"

"That Wonder Years moment we just had, it was like a pep talk for your brain."

"That was you blabbering incoherently and trying to distract me with song lyrics." Zack sniffed, then glanced at the rosy faced man critically. "Modest Mouse, really?"

"Don't go there man." The index finger of doom came to rest right in-between his eyes. "I liked them back in nineteen ninety five when no one had even heard of them so back off." He nodded vigorously at his young padawan

He hopped off the counter dejectedly and Dewey felt a silver bubble of sympathy rising in his throat. Sighing heavily, Zack turned to the avocado colored refrigerator while Dewey searched the Morning Times for the comics eager to see what trouble Marmaduke had gotten himself into that morning

And Zack, standing in front of the swamp colored fridge littered with ticket stubs and refrigerator magnets listening to the light sounds of the newspaper pages brushing together thought:_ This is normal._ Laughter. Noise in a kitchen. _This was how it's supposed to b_e. It was so warm and temperate comfortable: domestic, he didn't feel like a piece of furniture some chore that had to be attended to. He felt normal and irritated and happy like a kid was supposed to. Emotions were thick like blocks of color in his head, blotting each other out with the swift grace of a musical movement.

He could almost feel what was coming next, slipping down his spine like cool perspiration. Everything was so harsh and beautiful and it all went slinking down some pre formed line. Moments he'd lived before.

"Hey man, you just missed Summer."

Zack's pale hand shook slightly on the fridge handle. His thin fingers reverberating against the broad cold metal in a tremor bravado.

"Dropped off designs for the album cover some kid in her class made. They're pretty sweet man I don't know dude I think I might have like, messed her up in the head or something."

Tense shoulders like wet wings of a moth against his ears, pits of warm pressure encircling each other in his small shoulder blades. Raw sensation that lived in his skin burnt and battered by his boiling blood.

"I got to the door with the robe open cause I thought it was the paper guy. He doesn't ask any questions about the bill if he thinks you're part of a nudist colony."

" Summer freaked out. There was major wiggage so if you see her at school today tell her I'm sorry and I didn't mean to flash her and I thought she was the paper guy."

Dewey blinked at the back of the tense form huddled in the breakfast nook.

"Zack man, usually we keep the milk in the fridge. "I know you're used to the fresh stuff and I'm sorry we don't have a goat to milk but don't look down on homonogized milk dude, it's the shit."

His fingers tightened round the handle as he jerked open the fridge in a spurt of movement embroidered in haste. Some obscure _Killers_ song started in his head and he felt the cold handle of the milk as he yanked it out of the abyss.

"You want to see the designs, they're pretty kick ass man, one of 'em is you guys in a submarine being chased by the grim reaper in a scuba diving outfit."

Zack shut the door with a snap. "Uh…yeah." His voice had gone odd, sounded like tripping down a narrow staircase in the dark.

"Zack? Hello? You okay dude?"

"Yeah." He said quickly as he retrieved the golden box from the shelf and began hunting for a clean bowl and spoon in the pack of filthy dishes that lay in the sink like victims of the plague.

Dewey frowned. "I'm sorry man, I'm talking about band stuff when you're trying to get your Captain Crunch on my bad.

"No man it's fine." He replied absently sinking down into his chair "Sounds cool."

His eyes lied but Dewey didn't go after it. "You know you're parents called me at like four o clock this morning?"

Zack in the midst of flooding his cereal in a shaky steam of milk sent a small spray over the sample album covers Dewey had strewn across the table.

"Like an hour after you went back to bed, I was having this sweet dream about Cream and Zeppelin getting into a street fight. Dude it was so annoying I gave 'em a piece of my mind until he yelled at me in that Hitler voice and I realized it your dad. Yeah that was awkward."

"What did he say?" Zack's eyes were riddled with a sharp focus and his voice had descended worn and heavy back to Earth.

Dewey shrugged. "Don't give you sugar or show you porn and stuff. He asked how stuff here was."

Zack gave him a long glance. "And what'd you tell him?"

"The truth man, that you were out scoring some nose candy before the rave started."

The boy dropped his spoon into his bowl, a grin blooming at the corner of his mouth

completely against his will.

"I'm kidding dude, relax." Dewey shrugged, folding the paper in half. "I told him you'd call him when you'd slept off the hangover."

He imagined the rictus of horror, the self-righteous fury that would spread across his patriarch's face like a badly drawn cartoon and tired to keep his face from seizing up into a smile that caught the entire morning in its glow.

"Doesn't have a sense of humor your dad." Dewey said from behind the paper.

"Yeah." Zack grinned feeling dizzy and full with a strange satiation that knotted in his stomach like defunct intestines, the shooting pains of freedom. "Not so much."

Dewey's mouth opened and Tommy Shaw's sprawling voice spilled out. It attacked Zack's ears like verbal poison. He grabbed his bowl as the kitchen began to quake. The walls shook with a domestic fury like the crumbling walls of a dirt cave; plates and glasses fell from their shelves and shattered on the floor, breaking into hundreds of pieces like glass butterflies. Coffee mugs and calendars flew past his head in sheets as the broken light shook dangerously overhead.

"God damn it!" Dewey growled.

Despite the fact that it was geographically impossible, Zack was sure it was an earthquake, it pounded in his head like an angry hurricane pummeling the air round him and made Dewey's hair stand up. The noise pollution rattled the small windows and shook the cat clock above the fireplace and Zack realized it wasn't an earthquake, it was worse.

Styx.

"That's it!" His wide musical mentor slammed his large fist on the table and made to stand. He gripped the back of his chair breathing like a crippled walrus. "If that mofo wants to dance we'll dance!"

He made a shaky path to the corner of the living room, books toppling off the shelves dangerously close to his head. Leaning against the fireplace, his face a mirage of sweat and mania he gripped a CD from the hanging disk shelf and tore it open.

Then music, so loud it nearly knocked Zack backwards. He grasped the table as the kitchen was blasted apart by Gene Simmons primal howling. Dewey stood next to the CD player beaming, and nodded his head enthusiastically. Calmly walking back to the table and plopping down he snatched up his newspaper and resumed his reading.

"You know this is only going to lead to more animosity?" Zack yelled.

"What?"

"It's only gonna make him whip out the Michael Bolton and the Celeine Dion!"

"I can't hear you!"

"This isn't going to solve anything!"

"What are you talking about dude, KISS brings everybody together. Hey you want me to go over there and request some Blink?"

"I'd rather go to school Zack shouted. "Or choke and die on my own vomit."

"Either way, you get out of the house dude."

"Can I use the phone?"

"Sure man. Who do you need to call?"

"Child Services, I'll only be on a minute"

"Forgot to pay the bill this month ese you can use fetus face's phone, he's down the hall dude."

Zack stood up with his hands pressed against his ears and proceeded to walk shakily across the crumbling kitchen.

"Where you going man?"

"To get dressed!"

"What do you mean?" Dewey's face trembled with the grin he was trying to beat back. I thought you were gonna hang here today dude?"

Zack made a dismissive motion with his long pale limbs as he padded slowly toward the bathroom. "That sucks man I was looking foreword to chilling with you today."

"Shut up."

"I'm serious man. He grinned widely as the bathroom door slammed shut. "I was totally digging hanging out, we were gonna surf some bars pick up some women go down to Gino's and bet on some horses it was gonna be sweet. Zack man! I hope your deafness doesn't mess with our friendship dude, I care about you man!"

He could hear the furious beat of the shower water underneath the bad ass bass solo. He totally felt like the a tool for using that reverse psychology thingy on the poor kid but he would have rather had to sit through a minor session of morose silence that spoke volumes about how much stuff sucked right now, then have an over the phone powwow with his old man about how he wasn't going to school and stuff. It was tricky, having Zack there was fucking awesome but it also meant being like a…god he couldn't even say the word, like a _parent_ and that felt like he was taking a small internship for the Man.

Which sucked.

But dude having the kid there was worth it. And who knew what crazy ass stuff Papa Mooneyham would pull if he found out Zack wasn't going to school. _Don't that about that_. He shook himself and scanned the paper for the small circle with the huge dog in it. The joke only took him a second to get and the booming laughter that flew out of his lips filled the small silence in which his CD player changed tracks.

That damn Marmaduke.

AN: Oy with the irrelevance. The next chapter will deal with school, and will hopefully be a bit more even.


	5. The Distance

**AN: **Wow, other than issues with its length, I'm actually somewhat satisfied with this chapter…it must be the lack of sleep. Not too much to tell oy with the cursing though, damn kids and their foul language.

**Rockerchik777: **I'm glad you liked the chapter,_ Spinal Tap_ is such an awesome movie! I haven't seen it in a long time.

**Dozengirl: **I'm glad you enjoyed it!

**United Nude Postmasters IDH: **Thank-you for the compliment, Dewey is a fantastic character and I hope I adequately captured all of his robust enthusiasm and essential…Dewey-ness. He's kind of like Zack's musical mentor, but he ends up coming off as a paternal figure more often than not.

V

The Distance

"_Like a winter storm, _

_fear's gonna pierce your bones oh yes you will find out. _

_You can't hold out, you can't hold out _

_Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere"_

The Rolling Stones _"I am Waiting"_



Horace Green High School, the most picturesque of prisons sat at the end of the long green field like a Norman Rockwell painting, among gleaming juniper trees, mating Cardinals and the foamy warmth of fountain's spray.

It made Mooneyham want to vomit.

In true eighties teen movie fashion five members of the Varsity lacrosse team were waiting for him as he trudged across the sunlit crest of the hill. Standing in a violent looking formation, like vengeful geese, sticks in their hands laughing and talking to each other like the contestants of _The Price Is Right_ on pot.

It hadn't gone well. ("Gentleman." "You ready to die mother fucker!" "I wasn't ready to die two days ago what makes you think I've changed my mind?" "Why don't you suck it queer!" "I'd rather go to a White Stripe's concert.") And now he stood in the white hall flooded with maroon blazers and striped ties, dirt on his black converses, mud in his hair limping slightly. The faint imprint of the sharp end of a lacrosse stick lay on his pale forehead.

The hall buzzed under the hot lights, trophies glittered abrasively from their glass cases and the bored ghosts marched in formation in front of him. Hunched maroon shoulders identical moving in a slow assembly line pushing together like restless atoms. _We Don't Need No Education_

He felt the fever rising like deep maroon in his throat, hot in his brain as he staggered down the hallway like Dante down the steps of Hell, face streaked with dirt. So many atoms pressing against his small shoulders, Mick Jagger yelling at him to get a life from the broken headphones lying round his ears, everything smelled like teen spirit.



Truly, it was as if he were the first person to walk down a goddamned hallway.

All the eyes were like the harsh glow of reckless fire. Gazes, some quick, others lingering, shy and daring and cautious all plied into the side of his head like tiny drills carving their initials on the narrow shadow of his cheek. Eyes all the same, the spiky haired, lacrosse playing fucktard still a little hungover from that midnight beach party over the weekend, leaning up against the lockers easy grin sliding across his face as he took in the raven hair and small waist and delicate fingers.

Shy soft haired freshman, budding desert roses with creamy skin and flushed cheeks fumbling with their locker combinations as they flicked short telling glances in his direction. Hungry looking seniors, panting and insubordinate smelling of Marlboro's and the Clash gazing with a terrible rapturous hunger that gnawed at their stained eyes.

He was painfully aware of the fact that he was thin and pale and the stark hair that pitched forward against his sunken skin cast a shadow over his dark brown eyes framed in black eyeliner. And yeah, one glance in the harsh stainless glass of the trophy cases confirmed it: he looked like Billy Joe Armstrong with anorexia One hand gliding across the cool lockers, the other clutching his black messenger bag as if it were his mother's milk in a solid form.

He hadn't really expected the morning to begin any differently, by arriving early he'd left a giant window open ripe with ass-kicking possibility. By wearing his Creed Sucks button, he had both failed to prevent the ass kicking and invited it with open arms like a distant relative.

The champagne colored walls were moving, winking at him drowsily as the fever rose screaming in his brain. He tripped and fumbled over his feet pangs in his chest long black lashes twitching. Zack lay his head against the cool door of his locker, feeling his brain boiling, feeling a form in the ashes of some noxious gas that filled his head and helped the nervous nausea pass away.

A Wall.

Perspiration gripping his fingers in a thin, glossy webbing skin raw and red and checkered with invisible bruises from the long train of visual molestation. When he opened his eyes again there grazed two worried pairs of worried orbs that glittered like dull stars. Marco and Gordon were standing a few feet away, paused in front of their open lockers looking at him as if he were the Messiah in their ham and tuna fish sandwich.

Marco's flaming red hair stood frozen like a wave of fire magnetized like the villain of a Kung-fu movie on Gordon's round spectacles. They stood with their shoulders together peering at him cautiously as if he had the bubonic plague and was intent on sharing it with them.

Zack grinned widely. They were like fucking Lavern and Shirley.

"You okay Zack?"

"Yeah, you look sick."

The boy put his hands together and bowed at them ceremoniously almost toppling over. He paused for a moment, startled then pushed off the wall like an inebriated figure skater and practically floated through the swelling sea of blazers and ties eventually coming to the other side of the hall, where his comrades watched him enter what he would soon find out was the wrong classroom.

Gordon turned to the red haired boy trying to get pieces of lint off of his blazer, and straightened his glasses.

"I think he's on dope."



The day swam before his eyes like a dream. Flashes of sound and color deaf and dumb staggering through the misty lines.  
A sugary drowsy garden of happy neon fatigue bloomed at the sharp corners of his spirit when he barreled into Intro to Musical Theory. All the light and the spinning and the sugar oozing in his blood made him feel as if he were on the inside of a piñata some little kid with epilepsy was beating the crap out of with a sawed off shotgun. 

Pre Calculus was hard. Solid like granite and truth, something he could feel under his fingernails, firm dough kneaded with theory and fact. Equations and formulas spread themselves in messy hieroglyphics made of red dust in his brain. Civics was worse than being trapped on the teacup ride in the Euro Disney in hell. Law and rhetoric and the women in Jersey who drowned her four kids in their own bath water because they wouldn't stop crying when she was trying to watch _"Wheel of Fortunel_".

He tipped his chair back in Lit class, listening to the cheery beep of Tetris on Leonard's Gameboy and all the dead talk round him that loaded in his ears like bullets. _The Game against Jefferson dude it was this goddamned close_, _Did you see how plastered Mary Ann got at her mom's wedding? She was totally hitting on her stepdad_, _Oh my god Chelsea, how totally fucking hardcore was that Maroon Five concert last night? _And (his personal favorite) _What the hell is up with Mooneyham's face_? Eyes couldn't stop pawing, mouths couldn't stop working, no one could keep quiet about it cause damn scars were cool. They either meant you spent all your time rescuing girls from trouble like a young Brando, or you went to the hood on the weekends and stole cars.

And there was nothing cooler than a heroic gangster who disguised himself as a delicate looking, moody queer.

Chem was a different beast all together. Hot stuffy air, warm pressure nuzzling into his neck and pressing into his shoulders, mind and breath swelling with the strawberry colored heat that was stabbed by dapples of hot yellow light. Black tables and pink walls, hanging plants and hot glass beakers invisible clouds of heat and knowledge exploding in the narrow curve of his face.

Girls blowing bubbles and mouthing pieces of John Mayer songs to each other. Maroon blazers thrown loosely around small shoulders, black curls and light brown tresses that fell against unbuttoned collars like vines Creamy skin peeking shyly from behind the soft white material, bright eyes framed in lush blue and dangerous brown, Cheshire smiles and laughter and sweet whispers. He couldn't concentrate.

The fever rose higher and higher, there were clouds and whispers and neurons bouncing round in his brain another brick in the Wall. A golden haired girl with a narrow pout and limestone eyes that sat across from him in all the glittering fog kept grinning at him and closing her eyes. When he leaned over to retrieve his pencil, black hair falling over his forehead, it was discovered that she had written his name on her eyelids in black sharpie

Back into the hall. Sweltering jungle perspiration mingled with mild mania an endless drum beat in his head. Pushing his way through the maroon waves, dizzy pounding drowning upstream. Shoved against the wall by sharp shoulders, drowning in hot air, he felt like Alice down the rabbit hole, and that house with the pink shutters was too goddamned small.

_Mother could I run for president. _

By the time European History rolled around he was fucking high as a fucking kite. Head on the desk drooling like an unconscious cat in the back of the room, smiling widely at all the happy color pictures floating across his eyes the class factotum's voice a warm winter song in his ears.

He made three dozen paper cranes by the end of the morning lecture sitting with his chin resting in the valley of his joined fingers behind his golden fleet. Upon the conclusion of the test over the Inquisition he'd begun to belt out "_You Need Somebody to Love_" in a voice that sounded like Grace Slick being clubbed with a tire iron. Professor Klausan had begun to yell and someone hurled a hardback copy of the World Atlas dangerously close to his paper fleet which like any good owner of inanimate pets, he scrambled forward to save, blocking the evil Atlas with his thin hands.

There was pain but not much of it, not enough to warrant crying anyway. The professor was to show a movie about eighteenth Century England, beheadings, Kings, prostitutes you know, the good stuff, only the projector broke. Zack volunteered to help with reconstruction of the defunct instrument but the graceful hand of the factotum went up first and his desire was wiped clean. Sucking on his sore fingers in the dark he watched light flicker and play against the strands of dark hair in the shadow of the broken projector.

_Mother should I trust the Government. _

And finally…lunch.

He stood in the dark grass on the thick green lacrosse field with his brain burning, looking up at the mass of fog overhead wishing that he could simply become vapor. Revert back until he was just a bunch of molecules then float up to live in the stomach of the clouds.

The wind blew his irresponsible black hair out of his face as he felt himself slip away slowly, along the lower lining of his dreams, palms adorned with orange Flinestone's Band-Aids. He stood there with his arms outstretched slightly feeling as if he could just disappear into the atmosphere, until a short fiery voice bitch slapped him in the ears.

"What the hell are you doing?" Lawrence's voice came out in short bursts like cannon fire.

He was standing a few yards away, on the hill next to the crazy cannon used in the pomp and ceremony of Horace Green lacrosse matches. Nodding his head to the ipod in the pocket of his blazer dark eyebrows all frowned together like the Andes Mountains; Zack didn't even have to hear it to know he was rocking out to Devo.

"Shh! I'm trying to figure out how to get all the members of ABBA in one room so as to better assassinate them."

"I think two of them are already dead." He shouted

"Then my job is half done."

"Good luck trying to organize a reunion. Lawrence called; short voice battered by the wind that caressed Zack's warm face. You want some wheatgerm?"

Mooneyham reluctantly shuffled over-paper cranes spilling out of his bag and making a yellow trail behind him as he climbed the hill-and stood next to the taller boy fog creating swirling shapes between them. The mist fought for dominance over the shocks of black hair that stood up like electrocuted woodland animals as the symmetrical face bobbed up and down, chin working furiously on a bit of wheatgerm.

"It's supposed to sharpen your mind." He nodded as Zack took a pinch from his palm.

"God. Zack grimaced. It tastes like moldy corpse."

Lawrence shrugged not even wanting to know how Mooneyham could make such a comparison. "Better than my mother's cooking."

He found himself in the clear glass resting on the bridge of Lawrence's nose as the large brown eyes stared at him probingly.

"What happened to your head?"

"Tripped on the steps." His cool hand swept across his forehead uneasily.

"You look like you caught a hand grenade in the face." The boy cocked his head to get a better look but couldn't see for the forest of dark hair.

"You didn't hear? It's the least expensive natural selection procedure they could think off, the kids who can run the fastest get to keep their limps."

Lawrence blinked. "You're a smartass."

"Really?"

Bobbing his head like a happy Hare Krishna the boy just grinned widely at him. "Come on, we're over here."

Zack felt the wind in his hair watched it sift through the other boy's so that his hair resembled a messy black kite against the sky. Sighing and clutching a yellow paper crane he hesitantly followed Lawrence, back through a labyrinth of vines and plants in the deep shadow of the school, to the front garden with swelling azaleas and blistering red roses, mazes of thick vines and giant plants

He could feel the Wall heavy in his head, glimmering yellow brick. It trembled against the sounds that traveled through the thick flowers on the black path to his ears. The excited beeping of Tetris, laughter and low chatter and Eleni's incredulous voice:

"You're insane Marco the _Hives_ are awesome!"

" Yeah if by awesome you mean they suck ass. Marco grunted. You just likes Dutch guys."

"They're from Sweden!"

And there they were sitting at a long table on the veranda under a big white umbrella, talking and laughing and throwing things at each other. Leonard in the middle of one of the benches emersed in his Gameboy, Marco and Gordon on the other side trading lunches, Billy flipping through the August issue of _Vogue_ Alicia leaning over the table arguing with Tomika who was captivated by the picture of Howling Pelle Alquvimest on the cover of the battered _Rollingstone_ Michelle and Eleni were pouring over, strands of blonde hair touching in the flashes of stolen sunlight between the trees.

Frankie large and granite faced shoveled down his food next to Alicia on the other side of Gordon whose profile all but obscured the light fuzzy edges of Marta's pigtails. The sun was breaking through the trees on their heads, the portable radio in Marco's lap was blasting _Pinball Wizard_ and Katie sat at the end of the farthest bench, playing with the shutter speed on her camera, short dark hair shading her face like a curtain.

It was the perfect picture. The Breakfast Club on crack cocaine. And Zack stood in the shadow of the yew bushes feeling as if he'd never seen them before, as if the portrait were etched in some thick perfection he couldn't fathom blemished by his awkward black presence.

Feeling old and fuzzy, like a television set that had suddenly become obsolete, he turned round ready to ask Lawrence if he wanted to eat on the field to find his comrade had already plopped down, still nodding his head and was in the midst of a lunch trade with Gordon. So he clutched the straps of his bag feeling like a nervous third grader with a bladder problem and approached the table purposefully, feeling the Wall glitter and glow.

_Mother should I trust the government. _

They greeted him in the usual way; a cheery echo of "Zack Attack!" like he'd just graduated from the AA program. He sat down next to Lawrence slowly and was overcome with the familiarity of it Gordon patting him on the back the line of excited eyes and flushed faces in the sunlight, Marta's shy smile. Moments he'd lived a thousand times before.

"Did anybody take the Inquisition test in EHAP yet?"

Sunlight flitted on the top of the table, between juice boxes and Ziploc bags and a worn red _Fraggles_ lunchbox.

"I hoped you studied it was hella hard."

Frankie was trying to see how many Batman fruit snacks he could fit in his mouth, Leonard's Game Boy beeped excitedly and Zack looked across the table.

"What the hell is it?"

The branches shifted and the sun poured into his eyes. Across the table the light caught itself on Marta's glossy blue eyes, she held his gaze for a moment and gave him a tiny grin.

"The lunch lady said it was water…and a little bit of rum to kill the bacteria."

"Sick."

"Sick like your face."

"So Zack Attack, Larry told us your parents are out of town,"

"For two whole weeks man, you know what that means-.'

"Party at Mooneyham's!"

"You units won't mind if we party at your house will they?"

"Naw it's cool." Zack tugged at his black Maggot Death wrist cuff, vampire Ned grinning up at him savagely. All the talk made a pleasant hum in his ears.

" Sweet, I'll bring the tunes Ace of Base anyone?"

It was one of those transparent pictures, if you shifted your wrist a little the back round turned blood red and Ned grew fangs. He could close his eyes and know which one was speaking; it was a game he played sometimes when he was feeling lost, disconnected. Like the old Zack.

"If you ever say something like that again I'm gonna fucking kill you."

"Calm down Alicia I was kidding…would you prefer some Vinilla Ice?"

"If you want me to go ice, ice baby all over your punk ass then bring it on."

Glimmers of the old Zack always fighting to get through. He could never rest. His blurry, tired eyes riddled with heat and fever turned themselves on to the flashes of the glowing field through the yews and junipers. Long and flat and green littered with copper leaves floating from nowhere set fire by the sun hiding in the topmost branches like a shy star. Blinding light playing on the bruise red leaves shaking and spitting, forming images in its center that shone like crystal, rubbing against his bruised forehead like a mother's warm hand traveling down his closed eyes and through his hair and shooting everywhere in great beams like kinetic energy.

"Where's Summer?"

Zack's head jerked up so fast it sent a sharp pain down his spine.

"In the library, where else?" Michelle rolled her eyes.

"She is still thinking about running for class president?"

"Oh Sum's definitely running." Michelle lifted her chin haughtily.

"Hardcore." Eleni nodded vigorously, ponytail swinging, the Death Cab for Cutie pin on her blazer shining in the sun.

"She was giving out tarts this morning! Gordon's eyes lit up. They tasted like little squares of heaven!"

"Who's she running against anyway?"

Eleni shrugged. "President of the Calligraphy club, the foreign exchange student from Pakistan-."

"And some chick named Mavis who just moved here from Ohio. Michelle said disdainfully. She's totally got it in the bag."

"Hey where'd Freddy go?" Lawrence looked around. "He was right behind me in line."

"He ran off. Michelle's harsh beautiful mouth spread into a wicked grin that cut Zack's eyes. "Said something about needing to _study_."

The catch in her voice made Zack's breath die in his throat. Unsteady blood in his ears, burning with fever, crooked vision looked down at the song lyrics sprawled on his shoes in black sharpie, the silence echoing in a deafening roar.

Lawrence nodded, one earphone hanging from its cord nearly touching his mashed potatoes, then turned to Zack.

"You want something to eat?"

Zack shook his head keeping his eyes down so as not to get caught in the glare of Michelle's gaze.

"Damn, Alicia swiveled her neck like an ostrich. Dewey should have called you bulimia boy."

"I don't think that works out too well as a stage name."

"It was a joke Marco, kind of like your taste in music."

"Bam!"

"Oh Marco got served!"

Then it was a rush of noise, wind through the trees, sunlit laughter and Pete Townsed shredding guitar like nobody's business. It hammered against the soft spot in his head where he sat with his eyes screwed shut trying to bury his black converses in the deep brown dirt. Focused all of his energy on pawing and kicking at the dirt until he'd made rusty patterns in the dust, kicking until his toes curled from the blunt force of the ground.

And he could feel himself drifting, he'd been leaning for a long time now, on a dark dock lying tied to a fading tether, bobbing helplessly half drowning half struggling against the surf and in that moment he felt himself slipping away from them. Being pushed down the current before he was caught on the large yellow Wall. Down the beach where they all sat eating and singing and arguing and he was bobbing farther and farther out to sea and soon the roar of the surf was so loud he couldn't hear the laughter.

When he opened his eyes he was sitting in the harsh bubble of the white Spanish classroom. Wide sombreros across the plain walls, the professor lecturing in long slabs of blaring static, verbs and conjugations and _mucho lingual tortura y humallacion_. It wasn't so bad because he had Marta. Sitting at her desk across the room, swinging her legs making faces at him and mimicking Mrs. Keach's actions. She crossed her bright eyes and wiggled her nose and pulled at her pigtails like Pipi Longstocking on laughing gas.

He wanted to press her lips together with his fingers to keep her from making those horrible faces but he grinned at them anyway. Making long dark lines with his pencil on the margins of his notebook, MAGGOT DEATH in crazy big letters, clean shaven monsters with spotted ties and glasses and long teeth roaming the lined pages with clubs and copies of _The New York Times_ in their claws. Led Zeppelin and Cream in swirling cursive dancing round tiny sketches of his guitar with a red and purple heart under the strings, Celine Dion with her hair on fire, the grim reaper wearing a Harvard sweat shirt, Hendrix's afro taking on a life of it's own and terrorizing pregnant librarians.

"Am I boring you Mr. Mooneyham?"

"No ma'am, I'm ready, alert and filled to the brim with a yearn to learn."

A glare that flew off him like vapor Marta laughter that didn't pause until they were in the corridor, shoulder to shoulder, marching two by two, down to the ground to get out of the rain Off to the fresh hell of a school wide assembly, moving in a slow assembly line, pushing together like restless atoms. Until it stopped. Until he stopped.

Turned sideways and disappeared when he felt the eyes on him. Pressed against the door of the A.V room, watching the lines pass. Shock of blonde hair like a smothered crown on his head, eyes the color of dark sea foam Thor with a hangover bashing his hammer against an angry beach. Just staring.

"Can I help you?"

"Your shirt's inside out."

"Thanks mom."

The boy smirked and Zack's fever broke, erupted and foamed all over his brain in hellish rivers of burning lava.

"You look happy, your Avril Leveign box set finally come in the mail?"

"Nah man, just heard you got your ass kicked last Friday. Freddy grinned. You've gotta learn some karate dude."

Zack could feel the ghostly rhythm of his heart in his ears. "Yeah…I'm gonna pass on that, see I'm really not good with hand to hand combat, kind of like when you try to remember how to spell your name and you almost give yourself an aneurysm."

One more step and yeah, there went his personal space. Plains of flawless skin lead by a short nose and those dark eyes, angry seafoam that pummeled his into submission and Zack didn't look away. Twin pairs of converse, black and blue toe to toe. Clenched fists and tight jaws like those fucking animals in _Fight Club_. It never got old.

And he could feel it, the final yellow brick being squeezed into the Wall. It moved forward in his head, great and glimmering like the looming bow of a ship coming through the mist, blue waves crashing against it. He looked right into the stormy irises the curling cruel sea rolling against tiny grains of sand and lightening flashing against the pupil and knew it was about to get ugly, ugly like an emaciated, one-legged Vietnamese hooker.

But he didn't get hit. Nothing. Freddy didn't go postal at all, Zack wished he would have.

The blond boy just looked contented like when you're playing Battleship and you have the exact coordinates to sink the other asshole only he doesn't know it. A dangerous confidence painted in yellow streaks across his face like war paint.

"I gotta go. Freddy said roughly, voice drawing out like the notes of some savage operetta, Hathaway's probably looking for me."

The grin was slow to spread across his face nice and steady, like a satiated fox. Zack imagined it was in response to the expression on _his_ face which he couldn't see but yeah he could imagine it. Short stab wounds to the chest made by an invisible pin, his breath got so shallow so fast god if there was a medal for how fast your breath could get shallow without you having first ran a mile while carrying a pack mule he'd-

His brain collapsed. Under the ghost of the fever and the lava and the dull sour ache rising in his throat like vomit. Freddy was grinning, inches away but his eyes were still storms, heat and congestion that looked as if they were ready to explode. And Zack leaning against the Wall breathing shallowly and holding his stomach in pieces against the sharp waves could feel his hands becoming fists, could feel the ache tearing against the walls of his reason.

_Mother should I trust the government_. Pale hands rising embroidered in slow motion stony faces silent in the storm that rained down on them, raging thunder and lightening a monsoon of anger and expectance and regret until a hard hand came down on Zack's shoulder.

The Dean's face was like smog, being torn up by all the light in the corridor. Large, meaty palms leaving a heavy sweat stain on Zack's blazer, fingers that had ingested far too much cheese dip at lunch licking at his collar as the elder gentleman passed them.

"Take it out on the Taliban boys." He said in that deep grizzly voice like Father Christmas on crack.



He sat in the cool dark auditorium staring at the ceiling entertaining thoughts of forming a mutiny. Color all over his face, still breathing hoarsely white knuckles gripping the armrests.

"I'm gonna shoot somebody if this doesn't end soon." Lawrence's glasses glimmered in the dark.

"I'm gonna shoot myself." Zack closed his eyes.

On stage Tucker McPherson a plump boy from his Civics class was serenading the entire student body to a screechy, ungodly rendition of _"Rock the Casbah"_ on his Autoharp. Audience participation had died within minuets of the number, and was now being replaced with boredom that manifested itself into paper airplanes, minor fists fights and catapulting things at Tucker's head. Tucker, unusually dedicated to his skill, never wavered for a moment; he had his eyes closed and was swaying with each movement of his harp.

"They wouldn't let us play at the school fair but they let this idiot have his own concert?"

"He got attacked by a rabid Doberman, they thought he was never gonna walk again."

"So? Lawrence hissed. I sprained my ankle on Eleni's trampoline did I ask for my own recital?"

"You made me and Gordon carry you up the stairs."

"That's because it stung like a mofo!"

Abrupt shushing erupted from the row of dark heads in front of them.

"What was the Dean talking to you about?" Lawrence whispered.

Even in the dark he could see Zack's face twitching like a fish having a stroke. The other boy cleared his throat noisily.

" Nothing." He shook his head.

His four-eyed comrade snorted

"There ah…building a private wing for the gifted on the football field."

"They want you to work sanitation?"

"Actually we were trying to decide upon how best to reject your application."

Lawrence grinned. "I hope you were nice about it."

Zack nodded slowly then cast his eyes round in the dark; feeling his brain cool and the adrenaline rush from his battered system like a tired flood. The entire marble hall was filled with the skeletal, hair-raising screech of fat fingers strumming thin harp strings.

Marta sat on the other side of him playing with the hem of her gray skirt and blowing breath out of her cheeks like a bored second grader. He could see Katie's long yawn and Tomika's round shoulder's bowing as she cringed in pain, Eleni covering her ears, Billy filing his nails vigorously, Leonard curled in a fetal position and Gordon a few seats away pointing at Tucker's down turned head and laughing at something Marco was saying.

Frankie sat on the other side of Lawrence pretending to hang himself with his tie.

"This is hell. Lawrence whispered desperately. I can actually feel my brain cells committing suicide!"

Someone in their row was blowing bubbles. They floated in front of him like a ghostly parade, clear and bright in the dark

"Then walk out man, no one'll see you."

They traveled up the folds of the arch blackness and punctured themselves on the wide plane of space above his head. Dancing a suicide jig on the cool air that glowed like glass.

"I can't! The sound is so bad it's messed with my temporal lobe!" And before Zack could look at him Lawrence had stood up and cupped his hands round his mouth.

"Music butcher!"

More shushing, prim and insistent. Someone in the back burst into applause.

Lawrence sat back down regally and snatched his ipod from the pocket of his blazer. "I wish the dog had eaten him" he mouthed at Zack before his ears were devoured by the deafening sounds of Devo. He began to bob his head and his comrade closed his eyes and smashed his hands against his ears trying to keep the toxic musical filth from raping his hearing.

He was shot out of his sunlit dream a few moments later, by the smashing sound of roaring applause and abrasive cheering. Fearing for a wild moment that he had somehow been magically transported to an _N'SNYC_ concert he looked round madly. Everyone around him was on there feet clapping and yelling and cheering.

_What the hell_? But he couldn't even hear himself think it because the noise was so loud. Rubbing his eyes like an inebriated banshee, he sat up slowly and stared at Lawrence, whose spectacles were bouncing on his nose violently because he was jumping up and down and shouting like a deranged cheerleader. He turned around and Marta was grinning and clapping, Leonard was howling with joy and Eleni-seemingly possessed with the spirit of Fred Astaire-was ballroom dancing with Michelle in the aisle.

He was staring at the unabashed euphoria dancing across Lawrence's face feeling as if the Dean had sprinkled the mash potatoes with ground up Ritalin, when he got it.

They were clapping because it was finally over.

Zack looked to the stage where the oblivious Tucker was waving his hat in the air and taking bow after bow. Lawrence grinned at him triumphantly. Exhausted, eyes lined with mascara and lost sleep he leaned back in his chair resting his worn Converses on the back of the seat in front of him.

"Thank you god."

He lay his head among the forests of maroon blazers and blinked drowsily at the high marble ceiling with the school crest emblazoned on it. Bubbles flew round his head; cries littered the air and the source of the impatient shushing noises turned around primly to ask the stupid tool behind her to please get his filthy shoes away from her head.

Zack's shoes hit the floor with a loud thump no one heard.

The Scientist blinked on like a light in his head as big brown eyes framed with long dark hair touched his own, softly as if the gaze was made of glass. Melting glaciers and broken windows in his head swallowed by hot lava and pieces of fever bubbles and dove feathers and the cool darkness that made her pupils swell. The inside of his mouth tasted salty like the ocean as his eyes vaulted into hers with reckless abandon, pink little mouth parted slightly, breath thin and hollow as her soft flushed face glittered in the dark like the opening of Monarch's wings. 

Her smile was like the opening lines of an earthquake he didn't have time to take cover from, the sheer force of its radiance broke the Wall in his head and flooded the curves of his hot mind with blinding light and arctic ocean water.

Summer.

**AN: **Thought it would never end didn't you? I think this chapter was longer than _"Revenge of the Sith" _Sorry about the length (admitting I occasionally go overboard is kind of like saying Kurt Cobain was feeling a little under the weather when he shot himself) I just really wanted to root out Zack's school experience.

Sorry about the nameless dialogue in the lunch scene, when Zack doesn't pay attention the voices don't have names or faces. Sophomore year I actually had a gym teacher who would end lectures on behavioral conduct with the Dean's only line. Oh man I love the Clash… and Coldplay as well, but that's neither here nor there.

I hope the reason for the animosity between Freddy and Zack is clear.

Oh…EHAP is honors European History…the most vapid class on the face of the earth.


End file.
